While New York City’s grandees may be in a quandary about a decree that men wear white tie to one of Manhattan’s most gala shindigs, The New York Times reports that New Orleans gents would know exactly what to do in such a situation.

In New Orleans, “being fitted for a tailcoat is a rite of passage for many a teenage boy,” Guy Trebay writes.

“Anything you’ve got a reason to celebrate in New Orleans — a party, a graduation, you just lost your first tooth — we dress up for,” Kenny Rubinstein, a third-generation owner of Rubinsteins clothing store, told Trebay.

This proclivity, Rubenstein said, is an outgrowth of Carnival balls, for which gentlemen are required to pull on white tie, stick in their shirt studs and dust off their tailcoats.

“You have to be wearing white tie to a Mardi Gras ball or you won’t get in,” Rubenstein said.

Trebay’s article was a response to a directive from Vogue Editor Anna Wintour that gents spiff up for the annual ball she runs that benefits the recently renamed Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year's gala is on May 5.

Trebay found that many contemporary New Yorkers don’t have a clue about what constitutes such formal togs and, if they do, don't know where to find them.

Moshe Halevi, who runs a formal-wear rental business in New York, told Trebay that white-tie-and-tails rentals account for a microscopic amount of his company’s income.

A mixed response to Wintour’s ukase came from Jay Fielden, editor of Town & Country magazine, which caters to the carriage trade.

“I think there is something great about trying to encourage a love of formality and injecting that into the pop-culture bloodstream, where so much suffers from the opposite,” he told Trebay. “But I’m not sure where you’d go to find tails. And if I don’t know where to get it, who in hell does?”